Previous Next

Just as Arnold uses an unpredictable meter throughout “Dover Beach,” he also employs a highly irregular rhyme scheme. Indeed, rhyme in the poem is so irregular that it would be misleading to describe it in terms of a “scheme.” Consider the rhyming pattern for the fourteen lines of the first stanza: ABACDBDCEFCGFG. With just one exception (“roar” [line 9]), every line in the first stanza rhymes with a least one other line. However, the space between the rhymes varies greatly: anywhere from two lines away (e.g., “tonight” [line 1] and “light” [line 3]) to four lines away (e.g., “fair” [line 2] and “air” [line 6]). The irregular spacing of rhyming words makes it difficult for the reader to notice the rhymes, much less keep track of them. The reader’s difficulty mirrors the speaker’s. Just as the speaker has a hard time making sense of a world increasingly wracked by faithlessness and brutality, so too the reader finds it difficult to make the poem’s rhyming resolve into a something orderly and coherent. There may be meaning in the world, just as there are rhymes in the poem. However, neither meaning nor rhyme appears in a readily apprehensible way.

Previous section Meter Next section Key Poetic Devices

Take a Study Break